Technological Resources And The Logic Of Corporate Diversification PDF Download

The thesis comprises three essays which examine firm behavior in the exploitation of their technological resources. It explains how the firm can drive value of their technological knowledge assets as a platform to improve innovative and economic performance and to develop new businesses. In the first essay (chapter two), I examine the impact of their properties of technological knowledge base on firm's innovative performance in the semiconductor industry from 1968 to 2002. I characterize the organization of the knowledge base, based on the nature of relatedness between knowledge components, complmentarities and similarities. The results suggest that coherence, as the overall level of complementarity between components makes a positive contribution to innovative capabilities, while cohesion, which stands for the overall level of similarity of components, generally has the opposite impact. However, in unfamiliar situations, where the firm engages in activities, cohesion is found to be beneficial for innovations. The main contribution, therefore, is to emphasize that beshond the diversity of technological knowledge and the intensity R&D, the nature of relatedness between knowledge components in the context of application is a key determinant of innovative performance. In the second essay (chapter three), I analyse how firms can take advantage of their technological resources as a platform to diversify into new markets. While technological resources and competencies are widely accepted to be a basis for related business diversification, few works have identified or analysed their characteristics in order to explain why such resources often determine diversification decisions. Chapter 3 proposes that the potential productive services underlying technological resources can be characterized in two dimensions: the level of applicability of technologies in new contexts and their potential complementarities when combined. Using a sample of the world's largest manufacturing companies, the study demonstrates that both potential productive services explain the likelihood of market entry and provide platforms for business development. However, the exploitation of complementary technologies is subject to decreasing returns. There is a curvilinear relationship with the propensity to diversify and the value of diversification for complementary technogies which diminishes over time. Chapter 4 completes the idea by studying the importance of firms' capability to combine technological components in productive configuration i.e. combinative capability, as a source of heterogeneity in diversified firms. It explores the moderating impact of combinative capability on the relationship between diversification and firms' economic performance in a sample of 111 world's largest manufactures in 1979-2003. Regression results show that firms can mitigate the negative impact of diversification on productivity by exploiting effective technological combinations and enforcing their combinative capabilities. However this effect of combinative capability is depreciable suggesting that when a firm continues to diversify into new business lines, the performance increase due to greater combinative capability does not last long.